Some say Australia has been lucky to avoid the worst of 2020. But not if you throw in the bushfires that ushered in the year.

The world watched with horror as forest after forest up and down eastern Australia exploded in firestorms.

Officially, 3094 homes were destroyed, and 17 million hectares ravaged. 33 people died. Nine were firefighters. Probably around 1 billion mammals, birds and reptiles also died.

A total of 6500 defence force personnel were mobilised nationally, including 3000 reservists. They worked alongside 7373 firefighters in what was surely one of the bravest, most generous public engagements Australia has ever seen, wartime or otherwise.

Did we get lucky with COVID-19? As of last Friday, Australia had recorded 28,059 cases with 908 deaths. On any scale, this has been a horrible event in Australia. Sure, infection and death rates here have been vastly lower than overseas.

Yet there is good reason for our better outcomes. Our well-resourced health system stood firm. We showed we can put the larrikin aside and abide public order demands. We toughed out the lock-downs. And communities looked out for their own.

But central to Australia's defence against COVID-19 was the mobilisation of our workforce. Officially, the nation boasts 101,000 medical practitioners and 345,000 nurses. Add in pharmacists, psychologists, physiotherapists and the like, and the Australian health care workforce totals 609,000.

Then add the nation's 282,000 teachers, 152,000 child care workers, and 216,000 aged care workers. Add too the legions of public servants, police, security guards, drivers, technicians, lab workers and so on whose daily lives turned to combatting the virus.

Barely mentioned, are the 20,000 prison workers in Australia who have kept the jails largely free of COVID-19 without, it seems, heavy-handed restrictions on inmates.

This workforce became the nation's frontline defence against COVID-19. It did the job, kept infections and death to a minimum. Surely this is another of the most organised, determined, big-hearted campaigns the nation has ever seen.

We end 2020 in a comfortable, safe stable, and we give thanks to the many who have served us. Yet Christmas is the birth of something, testament to a new way forward, no?

What is it that we can learn?

The fires should weigh heavily on the minds of everyone in the Hunter. Remember the tiresome debate about whether the fires were caused by arsonists or by climate change? Anyone living in a fire-risk area knows there is always the threat of the arsonist, and last summer was no exception.

Yet what east coast Australia endured, say scientists, were extreme weather conditions, and these will become more common as the world's climate changes.

As the host of the world's largest thermal coal export supply chain, the Hunter cannot shrug its shoulders at the need for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Politicians, corporate leaders, you and me, we all need a dose of bravery.

While there isn't an easy solution to climate change, no one in the Hunter is arguing for a dramatic end to coal mining, with 17,000 workers on the scrapheap. What is argued for, consistently, is a determined transition, actions that build new quality jobs and simultaneously end the use of coal as an energy source.

Our health and care sector also needs our attention. Our region's workforce is growing in two ways, the strut and stagger of the construction workforce aside. In the past five years across the Hunter, the number of professionals - well-educated folk in well-paid jobs - grew by 35 per cent.

Outstripping this excellent growth, however, was the number of community and personal care workers - insufficiently qualified folk in precarious work arrangements - which grew by 57 per cent. With only 9 per cent of private sector workers in Australia belonging to unions, we need to invent ways to ensure care workers have decent jobs. Be it in child care, aged care or health care, these workers are insufficiently trained, the sectors are poorly regulated, wages and conditions are below par.

What a year. Let's end it with determination not to waste the efforts of those who have done so much for us.

And a happy Christmas to you all.